Unrecognized teachers

Teacher’s Day has just come and gone. This is the one special day in the year that we Indians will not easily forget.

Teacher’s Day has just come and gone. This is the one special day in the year that we Indians will not easily forget. After all, nearly 20 years of conditioning has fixed September 5 in our minds. If only there was some way to do this with anniversaries and birthdays!

While I celebrated Teacher’s Day yesterday, I started thinking that our definition of ‘teacher’ is very limited. Only those people who stood in front of blackboards and tried to beat information into our thick heads are felicitated on the 5th of September. But knowledge reaches us in many ways, and many people and things teach us valuable lessons. Here are a few of those, and the lessons they have taught all of us.

1. Facebook: How to get through an entire day at work without being bored. Also, without doing any actual work whatsoever.

2. Offices which block facebook: How to hate. Also, how to use every internet proxy site ever created.

3. Smartphones: How to develop a sixth sense - that of instantly detecting every charging point in a 20m radius, because they run out of charge so often.

4. Advertisements: How to change the channel, through pure instinct alone.

5. ND Tiwari: Age is just a number, sex is for everyone. Also, how to deny everything, even DNA evidence.

6. Alarms: The value of 5 more minutes, which usually becomes an additional half an hour because of the snooze button.

7. Maggi 2 minute noodles: False advertising is completely OK, because people never expect claims to be true anyway.

8. Sachin playing a cover drive: There is a God, and He has created beauty, in the form of a cricket shot.

9. Sachin getting bowled: OK, maybe there isn’t a God after all. At least till the next sublime cover drive.

10. Cooks in college messes: How to create a material much, much harder than the diamond. They call it ‘paneer’, and sometimes add insult to injury by prefixing the word ‘shahi’ to it.

11. Our politicians: How to not be surprised no matter to what depths they fall, or what new scam is uncovered. How to choose between bad and worse, every election.

12. Angry Birds: How projectile motion works in real life, much much better than all those complicated 2D diagrams in physics textbooks.

13: Any picture of your school that you see a few years after you left it: How you enjoyed your school days a lot more than you really did when you were going through them, and how you really want to catch up with all your classmates again. Though that somehow never ends up happening.